David and Solomon: In Search of the Bible's Sacred Kings and the Roots of the Western Tradition (23 page)

Bethel was not merely an isolated cult place; it was one of the central shrines of Judah’s great rival, the kingdom of Israel. As a center of north Israelite ritual and tradition, located only ten miles north of Jerusalem,
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it was an obvious place of pilgrimage and devotion that potentially competed with the Jerusalem Temple. The repeated, hostile references to Bethel in the Deuteronomistic History suggest that it remained an important and active cult place even after the Assyrian conquest of Israel.

An odd story in the second book of Kings relates to the period when foreign settlers were brought to the area of Bethel and worshipped there:

We have already mentioned how Hezekiah’s reform of the Jerusalem Temple, at a time of significant Israelite immigration from the area around Bethel, may have been intended to discourage pilgrimage to the rival shrine and to unify a diverse population by creating a single national cult. But as long as the Assyrians ruled the territory of the former northern kingdom—and as long as Judah remained an Assyrian vassal—the opposition to the Bethel shrine had to remain merely ideological.

After the withdrawal of the Assyrians during the reign of Josiah, the situation changed dramatically. On the one hand, the population of the area would have been free to develop their own traditions and perhaps even dream of renewed independence under a resurrected northern kingdom of Israel. But at the same time, with no threat of Assyrian retaliation, Judah could begin to look northward and put its own dreams of a vast, “resurrected” Davidic kingdom into action. The account of Josiah’s reform describes his brutal takeover of Bethel and his desecration of the tombs around it as the fulfillment of prophecy:

To destroy the shrine at Bethel and restore the true faith of the Jerusalem Temple to that ancient place of infamy was the first, highly symbolic step toward undoing the centuries of northern apostasy and to resurrecting the vast, divinely protected united monarchy.

In the absence of clear archaeological evidence from the site of Bethel, we cannot possibly tell if this story in all its details is true. But as we have mentioned, characteristic seventh-century
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Judahite artifacts, such as inscribed weights, pillar-shaped figurines, and distinctive types of ceramic vessels, have been found as far north as the area of Bethel, suggesting a spread of southern influence there during Josiah’s reign. And two details in the Deuteronomistic History suggest that the conquest of Bethel was indeed closely connected in contemporary consciousness with Josiah’s fulfillment of his Davidic legacy. The only monument Josiah is reported to have left standing at Bethel was the tomb of the prophet who had “predicted” his destruction of the shrine. The second detail is no less telling: Bethel is mentioned as one of the places to which David distributed booty after his raid on the southern Amekelites (1 Samuel 30:27). Josiah seems to have been self-consciously acting the role of a new David. By his time, the elaborate Davidic tradition no longer was merely for internal Judahite consumption but had become the guiding doctrine of a holy war to bring all of the land of Israel under his rule.

The Deuteronomistic History thus can be read as a political program, from the conquest of Joshua to the days of the judges, to the rise of David, through the united monarchy and its breakdown to the days of the two separate states, and to the climax of the story with the reign of Josiah, the most pious of all the Davidic kings. The Assyrian empire had crumbled, Egypt was seemingly interested only in its coastal possessions, and Judah was free to fulfill its pan-Israelite dreams. It was evidently a time of great exhilaration and expectation. Under the righteous rule of the new David and under the auspices of the Temple of Solomon, all Israelite territories and people would soon live in one state, worship one God in one Temple in Jerusalem, and inherit all the eternal blessings of God.

RESHAPING DAVID AND SOLOMON

The book of Deuteronomy and the Deuteronomistic History, which contains the David and Solomon epic, were written to serve Josiah’s cult reform strategy and territorial (or state) ideology. Who were the people responsible for this essential contribution to the biblical tradition? Though there is no scholarly agreement on the identity of the leaders of this movement, the basic coalition of forces is relatively clear. The deep concern for the sanctity of the Jerusalem Temple suggests that its priests played an important role in formulating and promoting the Deuteronomic ideology. The concern for equitable social relations between rich and poor expressed in the laws of Deuteronomy suggests that a popular resistance against the excesses of the Assyrian period and those who profited from them was also involved. But at the core was a deep veneration for the Davidic dynasty that could only have been expressed by those with wholehearted sympathy for the welfare of the royal court. And the stories of David and Solomon—which describe the days of the pious founder of the dynasty, the establishment of Jerusalem as his capital, his great conquests, the glamour of the united monarchy, and the building of the Temple by his son—were put in the heart of the Deuteronomistic History.

The earlier stories of the founding fathers of the kingdom of Judah were largely taken over and accepted. Yet the vivid accounts of the personal flaws of David—which would have doomed any other leader by Deuteronomy’s own strict standards—could not simply be discarded in the compilation of the traditions, myths, tales, memories, and historical accounts of ancient Israel, south and north alike, into a single definitive history. The Deuteronomistic editors seem to have kept all or much of the previous material, which was first put in writing in the late eighth and early seventh century
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, only adding formulaic speeches (such as David’s challenge to Goliath in 1 Samuel 17:45–47), editorial comments, details of contemporary culture, and, of course, plotting the stories to serve their theological goals.

The new, composite epic drew in a wide range of traditions as a proven way to continue cultivating a national consensus among formerly separate circles—and to further Josiah’s plan of expanding into territories that formerly belonged to the northern kingdom, a plan that actually materialized in the case of the plateau of Benjamin and the area of Bethel. Hence the northern traditions about Saul—even if containing a negative tone about David—were retained in the story, though in comparison to David, tarnishing and diminishing the stature of Saul.

The Deuteronomistic historians also retained the earlier stories of the wealth, wisdom, and greatness of Solomon drawn from the high age of Assyrian imperialism. Those elaborate descriptions of unimaginable riches and power could be used to show what the future might again hold for Judah, if the law was obeyed and a united monarchy of all Israel could be constructed “again.” But the Solomon story (1 Kings 11:1–10) also provided a lesson that global trade and internationalism could breed apostasy—and endanger Judah’s age-old tradition and identity.

In accordance with this ideology, the author of Deuteronomy’s “Law of the King” seems to have used Solomon’s greatness and opulence to express a message of condemnation about kings who sought majesty above righteousness:

The lesson was clear and unambiguous: only Solomon’s wisdom and his Temple were important. All the other trappings of worldly power that he cherished so greatly—horses, wives, and wealth—were sinful diversions from observing the true will of God, past and present.

The long and complex description of the construction and inner layout of the Temple, which—as we hinted in the previous chapter—could have dated a bit earlier than the days of Josiah, may have served to bolster his thorough cleansing of all idolatrous objects by showing that the current, purified Temple resembled Solomon’s original, divinely inspired sanctuary in every way. And indeed it is noted, in the characteristic phrase of the Deuteronomistic historian, that the poles of the Ark of the Covenant in Solomon’s Temple “were so long that the ends of the poles were seen from the holy place before the inner sanctuary; but they could not be seen from outside; and they are there to this day” (1 Kings 8:8).

This layer of Deuteronomistic revision substantially completed the biblical story of David and Solomon in the books of Samuel and 1 Kings that is so familiar to us today. Minor elements were inserted later, but the spirit and general tone of the story—as well as the traces of all its previous layers of creative mythmaking, storytelling, memory collection, ideological development, and literary activity—remained intact.

THE MESSIANIC LEGACY

As things turned out, the original Deuteronomistic dream came to nothing, at least on the earthly plane. In 609
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, Pharaoh Necho, the son and successor of Psammetichus I, embarked on a massive military expedition to assist the dying remnant of the Assyrian empire in recapturing the city of Harran, far to the north. The second book of Kings offers a laconic account of an event that would have enormous implications, not only for Judah and its Davidic legacy, but for the subsequent religious history of the western world:

We can only speculate on the reasons for this execution, for the event is not reported outside the Bible.
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Whether it was the boldness of Josiah’s manner toward the pharaoh—who must have expected the king of Judah to declare his vassal oath—or possible reports of unauthorized and threatening Judahite expansion in the Shephelah and the highlands, we do not know. But one thing is clear: even though Josiah’s son Jehoahaz was duly anointed as the legitimate successor in the line of David, the Hebrew term for “anointed one,”
mashiach
(messiah) would henceforth bear a new significance. So much hope had been invested in the destiny of Josiah, the new David, and so sure were his supporters of the inevitability of their divinely promised triumph that his death at the hands of the pharaoh caused a national trauma that would never be healed. Even the name of the place of his assassination—Megiddo—has never been forgotten. Har Megiddo (“the mound of Megiddo”), translated from the Hebrew into Greek centuries later as “Armageddon,” would always be remembered as the fateful spot where the forces of good and evil would someday do battle to determine the fate of the world. A righteous king of the lineage of David would someday return to the place where the last righteous Davidic king perished. With the death of Josiah in 609
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, the tradition of Judeo-Christian eschatology and Davidic messianism was born.

The days of the kingdom of Judah were numbered. In 597
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, a Babylonian army laid siege to Jerusalem and carried off King Jehoiachin, along with an entourage of priests and nobles. Eleven years later Jerusalem and its Temple were put to the torch and the rule of the Davidic dynasty came to an end. But despite its destruction and the exile of its ruling classes, the story of the kingdom of Judah lived on in the narrative artistry of the biblical epic that had now reached its definitive—if still not completed—form. The legend of David and Solomon, as the centerpiece of the saga and model for Israel’s eventual redemption, would be told and retold for centuries, gradually losing its link with history and assuming increasingly cosmic proportions and spiritual meaning, from which it would never retreat.